Exit Havel

The King leaves the Castle.

On his last weekday in Prague Castle as the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel taped a brief farewell address to the nation and then took a telephone call from George Bush. Havel, who came to office thirteen years ago wearing borrowed trousers that flapped high around his ankles, now wore an exquisitely tailored navy-blue three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a tie that had undoubtedly done its duty at summit meetings and memorial services. A clutch of efficient aides scurried around his office door. A steward with a napkin folded over his arm delivered a glass of white wine. Sunlight streamed through tall windows, and chandeliers lent a glow to the flowers and the Oriental carpets.

The American President might have been surprised to learn that Havel's castle makes the White House seem inelegant, but Bush probably remembered the place well. Just a few months earlier, he had been to the Castle for a NATO summit—the first ever in a former Warsaw Pact capital. Bush, his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and dozens of generals and other politicians were treated not merely to the usual working meetings but also to theatrical performances organized by Havel himself. The NATO visitors watched an ersatz eighteenth-century dance (complete with powdered wigs and simulated copulation) that might have been considered obscene had it not been so amusing. They listened to booming renditions of the “Ode to Joy,” a souped-up “Marseillaise,” and John Lennon's “Power to the People.”

When I got a chance recently to ask Havel about his NATO productions, he smiled and said, “I didn't want it to look like just another meeting of politicians and generals, so I shaped those arrangements, to a great extent. The ballet was set in Central Europe and featured Mozart's music, and it also included elements of the American grotesque, to underline the Euro-Atlantic character of the gathering. It may have been on the verge of what Mr. Rumsfeld and certain others could tolerate.”

Awkward and shy, Havel is a curiously natural director. Forty-odd years ago, he started out as a stagehand and a playwright. He was an acolyte of Beckett and Ionesco—the theatre of the absurd. The sense of the absurd extends to his own life. There is surely no modern biography that is more improbable yet dramatically coherent. Havel's is the rare life, Milan Kundera has written, that resembles a work of art and gives “the impression of a perfect compositional unity.” Consider: A bourgeois boy becomes a bohemian playwright; he then becomes a dissident, who, for the crime of writing subversive essays and helping to organize a subversive movement called Charter 77, is encouraged by the regime to master the art of welding in a reeking Czech prison; finally, in late November, 1989, everything implodes and he is leading demonstrations in Wenceslas Square, and hundreds of thousands of people are shouting “Havel na hrad!” (“Havel to the Castle!”); within days, he is the head of state, working in the same hilltop redoubt that served as a seat of power for dynasts of the Bohemian kingdom and the Hapsburg monarchy, for the emissaries of Berlin and the satraps of the Kremlin.

During the uprising, which quickly became known as the Velvet Revolution, and for a while afterward, there were graffiti around town proclaiming, “Havel je král“—”Havel Is King.” The King tried to demystify his Castle. He ordered the costume designer for the movie “Amadeus” to create red-white-and-blue uniforms for the palace guards. (Communist-era guards wore khaki.) He himself at first refused the suits that his friend Prince Karel Schwarzenberg brought him. “I can't wear any of these!” Havel said. “I'd look like a gigolo.” In jeans and sweater, he rode a scooter through the Castle halls. He threw a “festival of democracy” in the courtyards, with jugglers and mimes performing while he wandered around drinking Pilsner and greeting everyone. Later on, when he discovered that the chandeliers in the gilded Spanish Hall were outmoded, a couple of typical visitors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, paid for new fixtures. For weeks, he drove his staff crazy as he monkeyed around with the remote control, dimming the lights, then brightening them again.

“When I first came here, there were many things that I found absurd,” Havel told me in his office. A sly, can-youbelieve-it smile creased his face. “For example, it seemed to us on the first day that there were three rooms, close to where we're sitting now, which you couldn't enter. When we finally got inside, we discovered a kind of communications facility for contacts within the Warsaw Pact. So we took advantage of that and sent a New Year's greeting to Mikhail Gorbachev. Later, I heard from confidential sources that the K.G.B. chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, didn't really appreciate the fact that we'd found those facilities.”

Within a few months of Havel's ascension, the euphoria of the Velvet Revolution began to fade. The poetry of those winter weeks, the theatrical press conferences and the street rallies, yielded to the prose of governing a ruined state. No more scooters, no more sneaking out of the Castle for a drink at a local pub. Havel allowed that he felt “strangely paralyzed, empty inside,” fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. “At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down,” he told an audience in Salzburg. “It was the sensation of a Sisyphus mentally unprepared for the possibility that his efforts might succeed, a Sisyphus whose life had lost its old purpose and hadn't yet developed a new one.”

Havel had been preceded by dictators and, therefore, had to learn to be a President nearly on his own. He borrowed from many examples, especially from the humanism of Tomás Garrigue Masaryk, the President of the First Czech Republic after the First World War, and from his friend Richard von Weizsäcker, the President of Germany. (The powers of the Czech Presidency are based largely on the postwar West German model; the President is secondary to the Prime Minister in domestic affairs but has great authority in making appointments and in foreign policy.) At times, Havel felt thoroughly insufficient, a fraud. A familiar Prague voice, the voice of Kafka, told him what anyone who has grown up in a police state knows instinctually—that it could all end as easily as it started.

“I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks,” he told a startled audience at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, less than six months after taking office. “Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.”

In Havel's thirteen years as President—first of Czechoslovakia and then, after the Slovaks and the Czechs divided into two states, in 1993, of the Czech Republic—many of his advisers repeatedly begged him to delete, or at least soften, these public moments of self-doubt. What effect would they have on an exhausted people waiting for the radical transformation of their country? (Imagine Chirac or Blair, Bush or Schröder beginning a national address with an ode to his midnight dread!) Havel, however, would not be edited. The Presidential speech was the only literary genre left to him now, his most direct means of expressing not only his personal feelings but also the spirit of the distinctively human politics he wanted to encourage after so many decades of inhuman ideology. “Some aides tried to stop him, but these speeches had a therapeutic value for him,” Havel's closest aide, Vladimír Hanzel, told me. And yet, at times, Havel seemed not a President so much as Kafka reading from his diaries, providing an inventory of what haunted him:

Then there is a powerful feeling of general alienation . . . an experience of unbearable oppressiveness, a need constantly to explain myself to someone, to defend myself, a longing for an unattainable order of things, a longing that increases as the terrain I walk through becomes more muddled and confusing. . . . Everything I encounter displays to me its absurd aspect first. I feel as though I am constantly lagging behind powerful, self-confident men whom I can never overtake, let alone emulate. I find myself essentially hateful, deserving only mockery.

Political gossip, to say nothing of political journalism, abhors stasis, and Havel's last days in office were on the calendar of Prague's columnists and parliamentarians for so long that it became an article of faith that he was “just like Mikhail Gorbachev”—a figure of historical magnitude who had overstayed his welcome, popular abroad but not at home. Of Gorbachev that was certainly true. On Christmas night, 1991, when he resigned his office and handed over the nuclear codes to his hostile inheritor, Boris Yeltsin, his poll ratings were in the single digits. Havel's case is quite different. His popularity rating when he took office was more than eighty per cent; he leaves with around fifty-five per cent. Even for heroes, such endurance is rare. In 2000, Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, ran again for the Polish Presidency. He received one per cent of the vote.

Havel surely has detractors: the “lost generation” of pensioners and workers who could not cope with the dizzying cultural changes and the rising cost of living; leftists who still resent the collapse of Communist ideology; right-wingers who find his economic thinking fuzzy and his speeches naïve and too philosophical. Some intellectuals, like the social theorist Ernest Gellner, thought that Havel's rhetoric of love triumphing over evil had been admirable, perhaps, but “absurd, indefensible” as an explanation for the fall of Communism; that softness, Gellner wrote, had allowed members of the old regime to escape unpunished and reap enormous profits in the new economy. There were also subtler, more personal forms of resentment. One morning, I had coffee with a theatre director in his late seventies, who had known Havel since he was a young man. It was clear that the director disliked Havel, not for reasons of official policy but, rather, because of Havel's “moralisms,” his insistence, after the Soviet invasion in August, 1968, that Czechs try to resist the regime by “living in truth.” Even now, Havel's purity stung the director; it was a lingering and deeply personal rebuke. The old man had not signed Charter 77; to do so was an almost suicidal crossing. Only hundreds of people dared go that far, he said, while “the rest just wanted to live.”

Although the Czechs have suffered none of the violence that has plagued other countries in the region, especially Yugoslavia and Romania, the transition has not been purely pacific. Far from it. Despite Havel's objections, Czechoslovakia split. The “lustration” campaign to bar from certain jobs informers and other guilty people from the old era was a confused and traumatic process. “Why so much velvet?” some asked. Why appoint a Presidential team of inexperienced exiles and dissidents and tarnished Party hacks? Havel was sui generis to the end: he did not form a lasting party or movement; he had admirers, he had aides, but he has no real inheritor. In fact, as he left office, parliament could not settle on a successor.

Havel's most serious and persistent enemy through the years has been his political doppelgänger, the former Prime Minister Václav Klaus. For a decade, their relationship became the running story of Prague politics. Klaus is a technocrat and a Thatcherite—and, it must be said, a steely and arrogant man. He has always resented the “intellectuals in the Castle,” and accused Havel of being a “half-socialist,” in “love with state power.” In 2001, he said of Havel, “I don't believe what he says, what he stands for, what he does. I don't understand his civil society. For me it is an empty phrase. . . . He is the most élitist person I have ever seen in my life. I am a normal person. He is not.”

And yet, with those notable exceptions, almost everyone is quick to point out the dimensions of Havel's moral and political achievements, his importance in the reshaping of Europe. For a country that had lost so many of its best minds to deportation, Holocaust, exile, emigration, and suppression, Havel embodied a sense of the future and of Czech idealism. As a dissident and then as President, he was the most incisive Czech voice on reviving civil liberties and human rights, on restoring a sense of public responsibility at a moment of post-Communist apathy and greed. Havel was a playwright and essayist who wrote as if censorship did not exist; when he became a politician, he behaved as if his country, small as it is, were indispensable to the reordering of Europe. With his moral authority and moral glamour, he exerted an outsized influence. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and other leaders of the major powers were deeply influenced by him. The rapid expansion and redefinition of NATO is, in no small measure, Havel's doing.

One afternoon, I went to a farewell reception for Havel at the Castle. Hundreds of Castle aides, past and present, gathered in the Spanish Hall, under the Rolling Stones' chandeliers, and milled around, drinking beer, eating sandwiches, and lining up to say goodbye to their old boss. Havel posed for snapshots, accepted advice and best wishes—sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with a grimace usually reserved for a periodontist. Havel possesses a charisma peculiar to the shy. He is rather small, with tiny hands that play nervously at his lapels. He tends to speak to the floor or to your shoulder. Everyone leaned in to listen. Everyone laughed at his jokes.

Nearby, I ran into Michael Zantovsky´, one of his closest associates over the years. Zantovsky´ had been a dissident and was the author of a book about Woody Allen; after the revolution, he'd been Ambassador to the United States.

“I think this is the fifth or sixth farewell party, and there's more to come,” Zantovsky´ said merrily. “There was the so-called underground farewell, and, of course, at that one everyone got drunk.” Then the diplomat waxed grand. “This is the end of an era,” he said. “It means the end of transition, it means the end of changes and setbacks and new beginnings, you name it. What's going to happen now is that we will become a country like any other in Europe. Maybe I'm cynical, but these moments in history, for a person or a country, come and go. It's like Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, and ours was Havel's Presidency—especially the first years. Sometime in the future, it may come again, but at this point we are no more glamorous than Belgium or the Netherlands. As Brecht said, 'Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.' I hope we don't need another.” He drank to that.

Václav Klaus may despise Václav Havel, but he has a point: Havel is not a normal man. “I am just beginning to understand how everything has, in fact, been a diabolical trap set for me by destiny,” Havel said on a recent trip to New York, his last as President. “I really was catapulted overnight into a world of fairy tales.”

Havel was born in 1936, before the sellout of Czechoslovakia at Munich and the Nazi occupation, before the Communist putsch. He was born to good fortune. His father was a wealthy businessman, and his parents had a broad circle of highly educated friends. There was a cook, a governess, a maid, a gardener, and a chauffeur. The Havels wanted their sons, Václav and Ivan, to graduate from Oxford or Harvard. As boys, they went to boarding school. When the Communists took power, in 1948, the Havel family properties were confiscated, and, in an act of reverse social engineering, the regime barred bourgeois children like Václav from the better schools. Had it not been for the putsch, Havel once said, he would likely have “gone on to study philosophy at the university, attended . . . lectures on comparative literature, and, after graduation, I would have ridden around in an imported sports car without having done the least thing to deserve it.”

With a spotty formal education, Havel gravitated to the theatre, particularly the Theatre on the Balustrade, which was a center of bohemian artists. His younger brother, Ivan, a cognitive scientist, said, “Coming from a bourgeois family, my brother was exposed to literature and many interesting people, but he felt bad, slightly guilty about it. In his literary circles, he was the rare bourgeois and he was embarrassed by it.” This was Prague in the sixties, a more relaxed time, and Havel quickly adapted to a life of late-night discussions in smoky kitchens and the Café Slavia, beer and Becherovka, love affairs, samizdat, and rock and roll. His musical tastes ran to the Velvet Underground and, especially, to the Plastic People of the Universe. In his twenties and early thirties, he wrote a series of plays—”The Garden Party,” “The Memorandum,” and “The Increased Difficulty of Concentration”—that were all understood by their audiences as implicit critiques of the regime: its stifling “automatism” (a favorite term of Havel's), its inhuman language. Those plays, which were produced abroad as specimens of the cultural thaw, became emblems of the Prague Spring permitted by the Party reformer Alexander Dubcek.

In the mid-sixties, Havel, to the despair of his mother, married a poor yet regal young woman named Olga Splíchalová. Until her death from cancer, in 1996, Olga was a levelheaded balance to Havel's idealism and to his trusting nature; she was a practical intelligence and, through years of harassment and imprisonment, an indefatigable support. “Olga and I are very different,” Havel once said. “Olga's a working-class girl, very much her own person, sober, unsentimental, and she can even be somewhat mouthy and obnoxious; in other words, as we say, you can't get her drunk on a bun. . . . In Olga, I found exactly what I needed: someone who could respond to my own mental instability, to offer sober criticism of my wilder ideas, provide private support for my public adventures.”

After the Soviet Union invaded Prague, ousted Dubcek, and instituted a period of hard-line “normalization” that lasted for more than twenty years, the Communist Party banned Havel's works. For his part, Havel moved to a country house that he and Olga called Hrádecek (the Little Castle), and he veered increasingly toward a position of full-time dissent. Thrilling as “The Garden Party” was for young audiences in Prague, this next phase was even more important—and, perhaps, even more appropriate to Havel's real talents. “Havel has been a politician since the sixties,” the novelist Ivan Klíma told me. “His plays were exciting in their time and place, they had great meaning, but they tend to lose their context now, especially abroad.”

Far more ambitious, and more lasting, were Havel's dissident essays, especially an open letter to the Communist leader Gustav Husák and “The Power of the Powerless,” which served as the most extensive theoretical underpinning for Charter 77 and Czech resistance. Havel's prose reached its audience in a variety of subterranean ways: in typewritten, carbon-copied manuscripts; in books that were published abroad and then smuggled back into the country; or as broadcasts on Radio Free Europe. (As President, Havel repaid RFE by making it possible for the studios and offices to move, in 1995, from Munich to Wenceslas Square.)

If Solzhenitsyn was the great witness of Communist oppression within the imperium, Havel was its most acute moral clinician. “Havel synthesized ideas that were in the air here and, as it turned out, all over the totalitarian world,” Ivan Havel said. In those two essays, he describes the “entropy” of life under Communist oppression, the myriad everyday means by which every man and woman is “subjected to a prolonged and thorough process of violation, enfeeblement and anesthesia.” When I visited Havel at the Castle, his aides were packing his effects, including a painting of a Communist-era sign reading, in Slovak, “Workers of the World Unite!” In the best-known passage of “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel asks his reader to imagine the manager of a grocery who puts that sign in his store window, “among the onions and carrots”:

What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? . . . He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life.

The power of totalitarian ideology, he wrote, is that it acts as “a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. . . . It is rather like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure. This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline.”

Havel describes dissent not as an alternative political ideology but, rather, as an individual's insistence on his own humanity, on thinking and doing things, even the smallest things, honestly. In the mid-seventies, Havel had to make his living by working in a brewery, and, in “The Power of the Powerless,” he recalls a dispute at the plant. A worker there spoke out to his bosses about ways to improve production. He was not an intellectual or a political rebel, just someone with an idea on how to produce beer more efficiently. But he had dared defy his bosses, and that could not be tolerated. All too often, Havel wrote, living normally “begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”

And so it did with Havel. As an analyst, he wrote that the system could not tolerate even the slightest challenge, because its existence depended for its survival on unanimity. As a result, Havel knew that the knock on the door could come at any time. In a samizdat interview, he said, “I've put together something I call my 'emergency packet,' containing cigarettes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, some books, a T-shirt, paper, a laxative, and a few other small things.” He took this bundle along with him every time he left his house.

With good reason. Between 1977 and 1989, Havel was imprisoned several times and in many different cells. His longest term lasted from 1979 to 1983, and his singular relief from the drudgery of those years was writing a weekly letter home. “Letters to Olga,” filled with everything from complaints about his hemorrhoids and Olga's inconstancy as a correspondent to ruminations on Being and political responsibility, is his most personal book. Havel wrote the letters under terrific pressure, including that of a pro-Nazi warden who made sure the letters had no mysterious erasures or codes. Working in the laundry, he said, “I hid my rough drafts in a mountain of dirty sheets stained by millions of unborn children, and I would revise them during the noon break, while trying to avoid being seen by informers.”

The only visitors allowed were Olga and Ivan. They were permitted to come four times a year for half-hour visits. When I asked Ivan about those visits, he laughed ruefully. “I saw him more often when he was in jail than I do now,” he said.

One night during Havel's frenetic last week as President, there was a gala held in his honor at the National Theatre, a black-tie-and-evening-gown sort of affair with lots of television cameras outside and government ministers and pop stars in the audience. I went along to the gala with Jirí Pehe, a former exile who had returned to Prague after the revolution and become one of Havel's closest advisers. He told me that the gala had been organized by Havel's second wife, an actress named Dagmar Veskrnová, whom everyone knows, simply, as Dása. Unlike Olga, who had impeccable dissident credentials, Dása was a movie and television actress who during “normalization” appeared occasionally in productions of Shakespeare and Strindberg but more often in mediocre comedies; she once played a topless vampire. The gala, Pehe said, was controversial because the musical lineup would run more to Andrew Lloyd Webber than to Havel's favorites, Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. He was not exaggerating. Sometimes I thought I was watching a taping of a Bob Hope Christmas special. Dása had even invited Karel Gott, an oleaginous crooner who was the epitome of “coöperative” under the Communists. Some of Havel's old Charter 77 friends, including the singers Jaroslav Hutka and Vlasta Tresnák, boycotted the event. Prague is the smallish capital of a smallish republic; often enough, its politics are the politics of a village. Some Czechs, it seemed, could never forgive figures like Gott; others could never forgive Havel for marrying Dása.

“Olga was much more than a partner,” Pehe told me. “Havel was a bohemian and did wild things, and there were many other women, but he always went back: she was a tough, moral lady. She treated him like a boy, in a sense, and he liked that, he needed that corrective. When she was gone, a part of his universe collapsed. He remarried too quickly, in the humble opinion of the public.”

In Havel's opinion, Dása saved his life. A chain smoker and a veteran of Czech jails, Havel had suffered from pneumonias, a perforated bowel, and various other illnesses. “He's nearly killed himself in the job,” Havel's friend the writer Timothy Garton Ash told me. “He's been close to death several times.” The closest call came in late 1996. Havel's doctor found a spot on his lungs and treated him for pneumonia. Havel continued suffering fevers and double vision. Finally, doctors determined that he had cancer and removed half his right lung. (Just before going into the operating room, Havel was shown on television smoking with his Minister of Health.) Dása fired the doctor who had misdiagnosed Havel. (She also summoned a faith healer, but never mind.) The crisis was not over. One day at the hospital, according to Havel's biographer, John Keane, Dása went to visit him in intensive care. He was on a ventilator and seemed to be choking. Dása called for help, rescuing him. A few weeks later, Havel and Dása married.

With the image of Olga still strong in the public mind, Havel felt compelled to explain himself to the nation. “Before she died, Olga said I should remarry,” Havel said. “At the time, I ruled it out categorically, and I was resolved to end my days alone. She was convinced that I can't live alone and that I shouldn't. She was right, and life itself confirmed that when I was lucky enough to get to know Dása.”

At the gala, Havel sat in the Presidential box with Dása and gazed down at the stage with utter delight. He was egalitarian in his applause. He clapped for Karel Gott and he clapped for Ivan Král, a former exile who sang a ballad by the Plastic People of the Universe and then Patti Smith's “Dancing Barefoot.” But Havel's greatest visible pleasure came when an actor walked to the lip of the stage and read the text of a denunciation of the leaders of Charter 77, published in the Communist Party newspaper Rudé Právo twenty-five years ago under the headline “THE SHIPWRECKED AND THE SELF-APPOINTED.” At the time of that article, the Party leader Gustav Husák had confidently announced that the Charter 77 movement would collapse and Havel and “the hired puppets of these campaigns will end up in the dustbin of history.” It all seemed so funny now.

Another day at the Castle, this time in the company of Oldrich Cerny, a compact fellow with perfect English. For many years, Cerny made his living dubbing Hollywood movies in Czech. When he was a teen-ager, he saw “The Garden Party” and asked to meet the playwright. Cerny eventually became friends with Havel and ran errands for the coalition of forces called Civic Forum, which was at the center of the revolution. After Havel took office, James Baker, who was then George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State, delivered to the Czechs a C.I.A. briefing book outlining everything the Americans knew about the security forces under the Communists. Havel, whose English is limited, asked Cerny to translate the documents; later, he asked him to become his national-security adviser. Every time Cerny mentioned that title to me, he smiled and made the universal sign for ironical quotation marks. “I wasn't exactly Condoleezza Rice,” he said.

After the revolution, he continued, “we were babes in the woods, and so I went to the West for help.” Officials from MI6 and the C.I.A. helped the Czechs rebuild the security system, ridding it, above all, of its function as a private police and army force for the government. Even now, years after leaving the Castle, Cerny, like so many others, can't forget the arrival. He said, “When we first went into the Castle, it was so strange—sparsely furnished in the Communist style of a taste for the distasteful, with huge fake-leather chairs that made you freeze in the winter and stuck to the back of your trousers in summer.”

We finished lunch and took a walk to the old summer residence, a two-story villa, on the Castle grounds.

“This was Husák's house,” Cerny said as we strolled past a guard and approached the front door. “I still have the key.”

We went upstairs. Cerny started rapping his knuckles against the walls and the ceilings, which were unusually low. “When we first got here, I noticed that my cell-phone reception was very bad,” he said. “It turns out that Husák was paranoid. He had all the ceilings reinforced with concrete. Turns out he thought someone was going to fire cruise missiles at him.”

Cerny took me to the basement. And there was Husák's favorite indulgence: a swimming pool with a wave machine. “He was quite a swimmer,” he said.

Early in his Presidency, Havel lived for a few months in Husák's house. Naturally, this was a torture. “I find myself in the world of privileges, exceptions, perks, in the world of V.I.P.s who gradually lose track of how much a streetcar ticket or butter costs, how to make a cup of coffee, how to drive a car, and how to place a telephone call,” he said. Eventually, he got used to it all, though he never refilled Husák's swimming pool. There was too much work to do, thousands of documents to consider, a broken state to rebuild.

“From what I know, Havel cannot wait to step down,” Cerny told me. “He is exhausted, and he is not a healthy man. He also takes things very hard. When it became clear that the President couldn't save everyone's life, it became a ritual for young Czech journalists—almost as a rite of initiation—to write terrible things about Havel, and he never got used to that. There was even a psychosomatic aspect to this: he would get depressed and his body began to ache.”

The day after leaving office, Havel was scheduled to take a five-week vacation abroad. He is always coughing, and warm weather has been good for his lungs. At times, he has said that he might work on an “absurdist play” or a book-length conversation with Timothy Garton Ash and Adam Michnik. His aide Vladimír Hanzel told me that Havel had not kept a diary in office and so there would not likely be a memoir, or not in the traditional sense. One morning, I was eating breakfast in a café near St. Vitus' cathedral, and I read in the Prague Post that Havel in fact would write a memoir, but that it would be “somewhere between Henry Kissinger and Charles Bukowski.”

In a sense, he's been writing that memoir all his life. I remembered reading a short piece of his, from 1987, in which he recalled walking near the National Theatre and, by chance, seeing Gorbachev, who was in town for a summit with the Czech Party leaders. He caught sight of the Soviet leader amid the crowds and the bodyguards:

All of a sudden I find myself feeling sorry for him. I try to imagine the life he must lead, all day long in the company of his hard-faced guardians, no doubt with a full agenda, endless meetings, negotiating sessions, and speeches: having to talk to a great many people; remember who is who; say witty things but at the same time make sure they are the correct things to say, things that the sensation-seeking outside world can't get hold of and use against him.

In my meeting with Havel at the Castle, I recalled that passage for him, and he laughed. I asked him if, in some way, he had become what he had pitied.

Havel shrugged and began speaking, all the while staring at the carpet. “I remember,” he said. “Of course, I met Gorbachev about two months after I was elected President. We went to Moscow, for my first visit to the Kremlin, and we met for eight or nine hours. At first, Gorbachev looked at me as if I were some kind of exotic creature—the first living dissident he ever saw, who was coming to him as the head of a state that had been part of his realm. But, gradually, we developed a kind of friendship, which had even begun to develop at the end of that first long visit to the Kremlin.” Havel lifted his head and smiled. “I used to be a smoker then, and, after two hours of our conversation, I asked Gorbachev whether I could have a cigarette. He said, 'Yes, please, go ahead and smoke.' He didn't call to his staff, but, all the same, somebody suddenly appeared with an ashtray. There must have been microphones there, I suppose.”

A year after Havel came to power, there was a crisis in Iraq, and now, as he was leaving office, he was involved in another. Earlier in the month, he had spent hours with his aides at his country villa, discussing the problem, and that day, in the Wall Street Journal, there was a letter signed by Havel, along with seven other European leaders, which essentially agreed with the Bush Administration's position. I asked him why.

“I think it's not by chance that the idea of confronting evil may have found more support in those countries that have had a recent experience with totalitarian systems compared with other European countries that haven't had the same sort of recent experience,” he said. “The Czech experience with Munich, with appeasement, with yielding to evil, with demanding more and more evidence that Hitler was truly evil—that may be one reason that we look at things differently than some others. But that doesn't mean automatically that a green light is to be given to preventive strikes. I always believed that every case has to be judged individually. The Euro-American world cannot simply declare preëmptive war on all the regimes that it doesn't like.”

Havel coughed and took a sip of wine. I asked him why he thought a policy of containment could not work in Iraq more or less indefinitely.

He put his glass down and said, “Civilization has changed. Today, any crazy, practically any crazy person can blow up half of New York. That was hardly possible fifteen or twenty years ago. That's not the only reason. On the whole, the world has changed. There once was a bipolar world, a balance of two great powers, who made agreements on weapons reductions, so that they were capable of destroying the world seven times instead of ten. Now we live in a multi-polar world. . . . Of course, the question is: When is the best time for action? Should it have happened a long time ago? That is a political issue, a diplomatic issue, a sociological issue. But, generally, it's a matter of the functioning of the world's immune system, whether the world can deal with such a case of extreme evil before it is too late.”

On Sunday night, February 2nd, Czech radio and television broadcast Havel's farewell address. He took pains to thank his wife and his supporters. To all those who felt disappointed “or have simply found me hateful, I sincerely apologize and trust that you will forgive me.” Havel flashed his country the peace sign and his work was done. ♦

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.